The only consistency about the climate change protesters is that they are completely wrong

The sanctimonious climate change activists essentially want to put us back into the dark ages by ending economic growth.

Police have arrested more than 100 climate change protestors who have brought parts of London to a halt and vandalised dozens of buildings. They are part of an allegedly global movement demanding more action from governments to tackle global warming. The activists have deliberately set out to cause maximum disruption and to get themselves arrested for wanton damage and obstruction.

The campaigners belong to an outfit called Extinction Rebellion, some of whose members stripped off in the public gallery of the House of Commons earlier this month. They are in the anti-capitalist tradition of the Occupy movement which grew to prominence around the time of the 2008 financial crash.

Some claim a kindred spirit with the Greenham Common women who sought to block the deployment of US nuclear weapons to Britain in the mid-1980s.

The consistent thread running through all of these protests is that their premise is completely wrong. The Greenham Common militants wanted to prevent the Americans locating cruise missiles in the UK but failed. The Cruise missiles were deployed in response to the Soviet Union’s SS-20s which threatened western Europe.

The strong position taken by Nato against the Soviet Union led directly to the latter’s collapse and the liberation of millions of eastern Europeans. Had CND and the Greenham protestors won out, their freedom might have postponed possibly even to this day.

The Extinction Rebellion activists are demanding action from the British government which is doing more than almost any other in the world to reduce carbon emissions; indeed, it is arguably placing this country at a competitive disadvantage with unfeasibly ambitious targets. The sanctimonious climate change activists essentially want to put us back into the dark ages by ending economic growth. They are inflicting misery on commuters and businesses for no purpose whatsoever other than to claim a spurious moral high ground.

The UK contributes less than one per cent of global CO2 emissions and they are falling fast. Countries like China are the major producers and emissions there are going up not down. Why don’t the protestors take their pink boat from Oxford Street and park it in the middle of Beijing and see if the authorities there are as indulgent as ours have been.